Four Quartets Analysis

Man, oh man. Where to begin? Like much of his other poetry, "Four Quartets" uses Eliot's tone of high seriousness. But even less than "The Waste Land," this poem uses almost entirely free verse, re...

Unlike "The Waste Land," the speaker of this long lyric poem seems to pretty much stay the same person. It's also not that much of a stretch to associate this speaker with Eliot himself, in fact, t...

The setting of this poem can be tough to pin down, but if you want a great starting point, just look to the title of each section. To a large extent, you can read "Burnt Norton" as mostly happening...

Except for the parts where the speaker slips into tight rhyme, this poem basically sounds like really, really well written prose more than poetry. There's a rhythm to the whole thing, sure, but if...

The poems were originally published as stand-alone works, and only later combined in a series in 1943 (New York) and 1944 (London). Their original name was supposed to be "The Kensington Quartets,"...

In many ways, "Four Quartets" is different from Eliot's other poems; it's tone, for starters, allows for much more hopefulness than poems like "The Waste Land" or "The Hollow Men." But one thing th...

So how tough is "Four Quartets"? Well it depends on what you're trying to get from it. One thing that can really make this poem difficult to read is if you come at it hoping to "master" or totally...

Ezra Pound's nickname for Eliot was "Old Possum." (Lots more Eliot trivia can be found where this nugget came from.) (Source.)In 1986, Eliot's face was put on a 22 cent American stamp. But sheesh,...

This is Eliot we're talking about here, and he's writing about religion for more than 900 lines. Sorry, gang—there's nothing sexy about this poem at all.

Heraclitus (Ancient "Pre-Socratic" Greek Philosopher). Fragments. Trans. Hermann Diels and John Burnett. (epigraph) Hardy, Thomas. "The Darkling Thrush." (24)Keats, John. "Ode on a Grecian Urn...